How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Blood Meridian

Part III in a limited series.

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Let me say first off that Blood Meridian is not for everyone. In fact, I'm not sure just yet it's for anyone. It's certainly the most riveting novel I've read in years - but that in itself doesn't indicate much, other than perhaps a peculiarity in taste. I suppose I could be accused of being drawn to the ghastly level of violence in the book - I'd like to think it's more than just that, but I be equivocating if I tried to minimize how fascinating McCarthy's depiction of Western expansion is. Perhaps he swings the pendulum too far, but after years and years of sanitized presentations, his version makes it easier to believe that the truth might lay somewhere in the middle. Unfortunately though, I suspect it's closer to McCarthy's vision than what most people would like to accept.

But focusing on the particulars of Blood Meridian misses the forest for the trees. Of McCarthy's Border Trilogy, Cities on the Plain - even if it is a lesser work - is still indicative of his depth. Every criticism that can be - and is - leveled at McCarthy may be valid; pretentious writing, obscurantism, self-indulgence, violence for voyeurs, and yet the point I keep returning to is that McCarthy is struggling to put something universal down on the page. His style might remind me of a bearded, ragged hermit transcribing the intoned words of Yahweh onto a clay tablet sometimes, but the metaphysics that lay at the root of his novels transcend the fond contemplation of our social navel that propels a good bit of the current crop of American literature.

I'm not saying that a clear, honest evaluation of American society isn't worthwhile, whether it's done satirically or with dead seriousness. But I simply do not believe that concentrating solely on the social aspects of America in the last half of the twentieth century and through the first decade of the twenty-first, to the exclusion of more expansive (and inclusive) questioning of what it means to be human, is beneficial. In fact, I think it is short-sighted, vain, and ultimately - after following the exhausted trend to its current state - boring. McCarthy isn't trying to represent what it meant to be an American in the times that he writes of, and he isn't writing his historical novels as disguised allegories for our current situation. These novels are trying to expose something that lies at the core of a human being. Whether he succeeds or not is up to the reader, and whether the reader is even interested in being exposed to such a concept.

It strikes me that McCarthy comes from an older tradition, one that would probably include Melville and Thoreau, perhaps even Henry James and D.H Lawrence (Faulkner, if he isn't too regional, and Bellow, if he isn't too ancestral); writers who would not have taken for granted that chronicling the contemporary American experience was the only worthwhile avenue open to them. I think a question worth asking is if cultural presumptuousness concerning American Exceptionalism hasn't influenced our literature from the last sixty years to the extent that writers equate our personal struggles with archetypal augurs. Metaphysical novels won't ever be in the majority - and probably shouldn't be - but when I scan a shelf full of dysfunctional family dramas, writer's writing about writer's who are writing about themselves, and satirical send-ups of social mores, all of which masquerades as existential yet seems more angst than anything, I have to wonder if we just haven't become too full of ourselves. Although these other forms of literature are perfectly legitimate, and can also often touch on deeper themes, they are no substitute for the probing examinations from McCarthy.

Part of this trend comes from how our modern writers are groomed - a subject I'll explore a different time - but at the root, it is a decision by the author of how he assigns importance to his characters. Is society his main character (or man within this society, which amounts to the same thing), or is it man? If the subject is man, then the writing has a chance to be instructive, constructive - at least it clears the way for self-knowledge. If the subject is social, then it lends itself to mockery by those writers who feel above their subject, to clever self-indulgence by writers who feel they have a special dispensation to accurately portray our world, or to angry, disenfranchised authors looking to correct social ills. This can be clever, witty, or provoking, but the point is that this places man subservient to the society of which he's a part, rather than the other way around. Cumulatively, it is corrosive and demeaning.

What generalizations! I suppose there are more exceptions to what I've written than can be listed. As always, my points are only designed as an initiation of a discussion, and I'm always on the lookout for the claim that will alter my suppositions or change my mind outright.